December 2019 633 C&RL News

Shawnda Hines is assistant director of communications 
at ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office, email: 
shines@alawash.org

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eShawnda Hines

ALA leads national #eBooksForAll 
campaign 
Access to digital content has long been a 
sore spot for libraries. When Macmillan 
Publishers announced an eight-week em-
bargo on new eBook titles sold to librar-
ies, the public outcry was extraordinary. 
In response, ALA launched the #eBooks-
ForAll petition campaign at the Digital 
Book World conference in September. 
Coverage of libraries proliferated in news 
outlets across the country as more and 
more library systems led their own local 
campaigns to oppose Macmillan’s new 
policy. Just days before the embargo took 
effect on November 1, 2019, ALA hand 
delivered more than 160,000 signatures to 
CEO John Sargent. 

Though the #eBooksForAll campaign 
focused largely on the impact Macmillan’s 
policy will have on access to popular titles 
at public libraries, there are broader impli-
cations of the company’s business decision. 
So far, Macmillan is the only one of the Big 
5 publishers to institute such an embargo. 
ALA trusts that the outrage expressed by 
the library community will discourage other 
publishing companies from following suit. 
However, while Macmillan may be the only 
one to introduce an embargo, the problem 
of high pricing and restrictive licensing is 
rampant throughout the publishing industry 
—a fact which academic libraries know all 
too well.

Congress is catching on. Within days of 
launching the #eBooksForAll campaign, ALA 
received a request from the U.S. House of 
Representatives Committee on the Judiciary 
Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and 

Administrative Law, to contribute to the 
Committee’s investigation into competition 
in digital markets. ALA’s report in response 
to the congressional inquiry underscores 
practices by many companies, that “threaten 
Americans’ right to read what and how they 
choose and imperil other fundamental First 
Amendment freedoms.” Half of report is 
dedicated to the dismal situation for libraries 
that purchase academic and research content. 

The report specifically addresses several 
issues of note to C&RL News readers, includ-
ing the growing consolidation in the market 
for scholarly journals and trend toward so-
called “big deals,” once seen as a way to get 
a collection of journals at a discounted price 
but “has devolved into a restrictive agreement 
that limits financial and strategic flexibility.” 

Another issue described in the report is the 
future of the academic publishing industry in 
controlling and exploiting data. According to 
the report, data collected by publishers about 
students, faculty, research output, and more 
disturbingly “represents a potential multi-
billion-dollar market with… the same kind 
of dynamics that led to the rise of platform 
monopolies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, 
and others.”

ALA sees the #eBooksForAll campaign as 
the tip of the iceberg. We are using the suc-
cess of the petition to educate Congress on 
complex issues. ALA has also established a 
Joint Working Group on eBooks and Digital 
Content in Libraries made up of representa-
tives from ALA divisions and affiliates as well 
as numerous external organizations and co-
led by Leah M. Dunn, university librarian at 
the University of North Carolina-Asheville, 
and Kelvin Watson, director of Broward 
County Libraries (Florida). 

For the latest information about the #eB-
ooksForAll campaign, visit ebooksforall.
org. Join the conversation on social media 
at #eBooksForAll. 

mailto:shines%40alawash.org?subject=
http://ebooksforall.org
http://ebooksforall.org